Soldered
by Qu-ko
Summary: Accidentshipping 50-themes one-sentence fic. The evolution over time of a once-doomed encounter.


**A/N: **In which I have lost control of my ships and my life.

A lot of this is based off a personal RP I've been doing with a friend, so. Yeah. That's a thing.

I apologize for nothing.

* * *

_1: blink_

Like the blaze that had knocked her off her feet and knocked her life out from under her, it takes only one blink for IV to approach her like nothing had ever happened, and one more after that for her to drive her fist into his gut.

_2: fear_

Emotion cascades over IV's face when she tells him he has to forgive himself before she'll forgive him, and suddenly Rio realizes either she's been watching him far more closely than before, or she's developing a knack for reading people, because his eyes grow dark as they turn inward to assess which of the two of them he's afraid of more.

_3: princess_

"At least tell me why you don't want me making a habit of offering you my arm, so I can avoid doing it to any other ice princesses I meet," is what IV says to her that earns him a pointy elbow to the side and a look that screams, "That's ice _queen_ to you."

_4: space_

He doesn't, however, expect her to oblige him every time he does it after that, not even the first time he does it just so she'll flare up under the ice a little, so she'll see what a messy shithead of a human being she's trying (or not trying) to keep at arm's length.

_5: rot_

She follows the memory to its wellspring — down a small alley, one that looks as fresh as the day it was built, but one she knows has been decaying with emotional wear and tear beneath the clean exterior since the day it was ravaged by betrayal.

_6: light_

"If you're not taking a moonlight stroll, then why did you come back?" IV asks, and when he looks up at her, she looks so alone in the middle of the alleyway, her hair curtaining around her face and a spark of light bouncing off her ring; she grabs his arm and replies, "Because I knew you would come back, too."

_7: break_

"So have I broken any other unspoken rules?" she asks petulantly; his face becomes etched with sadness when he whirls around, clenches his fists, and tries to bite out a reply, but instead only managing to mutter, "Yeah, only doing what I wanted you to…"

_8: away_

After that, they go out and walk side-by-side sometimes, and IV will brush her hand in a frustrating little accidentally-on-purpose gesture; every time, before she even has a chance to pull her hand in herself, he yanks his hand away first as though he has no idea he's been doing it, and she feels a dangled part of him being yanked out of her reach, too.

_9: heal_

"I just wanted to tell you that I— I had a facedown set that I never activated, that day," Rio confesses, frantic like she's begging a higher power for forgiveness and trying desperately to undo the knots her intestines have become, "because I still have the scar that came only from keeping it a secret for so long."

_10: cut_

She doesn't even realize she's fidgeting with her deck in a nervous cut-and-shuffle motion, the same way her mind is doing with her thoughts, until IV stills her wrist with his hand, telling her, "Duel me until you can overcome it, whatever this thing is that's been making you second-guess yourself."

_11: breathe_

Trying to simultaneously breathe, think, and avoid dropping her walls again proves astonishingly difficult when she finds out he went out of his way to get her a present for her birthday; an individual present, not part of a set for a change, which makes her exhale with relief.

_12: memory_

Even when her body remembered her brief time under siege by fire of its own free will whenever he was around, she'll thread an arm through his again, and the distinctive tingling of ghostly fire vanishes with the relaxing of her shoulders.

_13: insanity_

She asks, half-sincerely, if he's lost his mind when he asks if she wants to play a little prank on her brother by having him walk her home; a part of him says yes, he lost it all right, and it happened long before she came to either help or hinder the process.

_14: misfortune_

Something in the air outside is the only hint of misfortune up to that point, until Ryouga nearly chews through the railing with fury upon seeing IV with his sister on the way home.

_15: smile_

He kisses her on the cheek before turning wordlessly to leave that day, and between Rio flaring up like a rocket and Ryouga's fingers twitching and aching for blood, IV returns home with the biggest grin that III testifies to ever having seen that night.

_16: silence_

The alley was musty and silent after that; Rio can only ever give it a passing glance anymore, less from apathy than from pity for an area trapped in a time long behind her.

_17: blood_

The next time Rio lands in the hospital after pushing herself too hard, she has to tell Ryouga off from officially having IV banned from her room, claiming that two things run in equal parts through their shared blood: stubbornness, and a tendency to get hurt through being stubborn for people they love.

_18: under_

Lately, she's been packing away her high virtue and letting him get away with the fleeting glances under her skirt's hem, pretending to everyone else not to notice him looking at her legs while pretending to herself she doesn't actually enjoy the attention, just a little.

_19: gray_

The atmosphere that day is a flat monopalette of wintery gray, but Rio is energized and awake enough to meet him for lunch, feeling much more colorful even amidst the dirty snow on the side of the street.

_20: fortitude_

She has to hand it to IV, though; it must take a great deal of guts to ask to be called Thomas, after all this time she's spent calling him by what she was sure must have been an assumed name anyway (for what sane parent would name their child after a roman numeral?).

_21: war_

It's a long time before she confides what she knows about the war with the Barians to him; IV — no, Thomas — wonders if he might ask his father what he knows sometime, _maybe, possibly,_ even though he knows he's still being kept out of the loop on purpose, and when she fails to follow up, the hollow assurance that Yuuma and Ryouga will certainly win makes her smile despite herself.

_22: mother_

The only thing he'd find as calming and dear to him as her voice anymore would be his mother's voice, but one of those is damn impossible to find anymore, and the other doesn't always sure what to make of the two of them, together, as friends.

_23: distasteful_

Rio has to scramble when a sharp and familiar knock sounds at the front door; she's in such a hurry to drop everything that she scarcely notices she's about to open it while wearing a large night shirt, and little else.

_24: want_

When the little, fleeting gestures from long before continue at an accelerated pace, she has to put her every natural train of thought on hold when she finds herself wanting to take Thomas's hand and keep it there on her own instead of letting it dart away like usual.

_25: lurking_

The thought breaks through like a slowly blooming flower, hiding fuzzily in the back of Rio's mind one moment, and turning into a fully formed need the next, standing far away from all the other futile, tail-biting notions swimming in her head: What if I stopped dancing around the idea of considering him a friend?

_26: europe_

The shopping trip in Spartan City had yielded great success, but the European chocolate she splurged on tastes just a little bit sweeter when she breaks off half of it and offers it to Thomas when the most bored expression appeared on his face; despite all the "that crap's too sweet" resistance he puts up, he eats it without complaint.

_27: foreign_

His own voice sounds hollow and entirely foreign in his own ears when he finally talks to III about it, when he finally admits that maybe he does have a crush on her, or something crazy like that.

_28: sorrow_

Something sharp jabs in her heart and threatens to spill through her eyes when he brings her a doll one morning that he claims to have received from an overzealous fan — pain, relief, or breathless astonishment, it hardly matters when she punches him lightly in the shoulder for being such a fool.

_29: urban_

The spire of Heartland Tower is just barely visible from his window, and often, he finds himself frozen to the sill as if she'd sealed him there with her deck and eyes of snow far warmer than the kind melting off the streets.

_30: rain_

The drizzle is slowly dampening their hair, their clothes, turning their faces to smooth, glistening sheens; when Thomas comments slyly that they seem to be starting a few rumors, judging from the people leaning their heads together and chuckling into their hands, Rio tries to pretend she isn't flushing and gripes that _he's_ the one who looks like he doesn't know how to use an umbrella here, but the rain still doesn't manage to cool her face down any.

_31: flower_

She acts like he's being ridiculous and treating her like the girlfriend she is most definitely not when he offers her a flower from a bouquet otherwise destined for the trash, but she takes the white lily home anyway and places it by her bedside, wondering to herself when she has lost control.

_32: night_

The next time he drops her off at her house, it's late at night, and they spend a long, awkward moment with their gazes just barely touching before parting ways; Thomas wonders why she keeps putting up with his inability to either act on things or let them go, like he promised her he would in the very beginning.

_33: wrath_

When she catches herself indulging thoughts of his eyes and his lips again, Rio thuds a hand against the metal railing she's leaning on, making it ring, and the sharp pain brings her back from the rushing tide of anger at her own capacity to lose her head around him.

_34: safety_

Her small hand threads discreetly into his, the metal of her ring warm against his skin; for no real reason at all, Rio can no longer swear to anything in her immediate vicinity except herself and the Asian Dueling Champion holding hands with her, but it doesn't matter, because nothing can hurt her now, or so she tells herself.

_35: walk_

"It's fine if everything's closed on Sunday," she assures him as she once again wraps an arm around his, "I'm fine just walking with you, if you don't mind the company," to which he offers her a true sterling grin.

_36: precious_

Rio admits that she has placed the doll he gave her on a shelf where she can see it from her bed, in sleepless hours where she would otherwise stare up and count the inconsistencies in the ceiling; it's precious to her, she says, and Thomas is sincerely astounded to hear it doesn't actually scare the shit out of her to have a doll watching her in sleep.

_37: see_

She notices lately that when their eyes meet, the awkward aversions and careful changes in expression have departed, and now, it's simply them seeing one another as people rather than emotional obstacles and tests of patience.

_38: abandoned_

One evening, she tries to leave early when she receives a message from Ryouga, but his immediate, frantic shout of "No! Wait!" stops her; he has to cover his tracks carefully, but Rio knows the expression of fear he wears — she's felt it fall over her own features many times, when she'd done the same to her brother in their childhood.

_39: dream_

It's strange how she comes back to reality out of breath and sweating, despite not having been sleeping, despite it being the middle of the day — Thomas asks her what's happened, but she brushes it off with a firm nothing, and his eyes still never leave her.

_40: alone_

When Rio collapses and spends a day out cold in the hospital after an especially strong barrage of Barian sensation, one of the hardest things Thomas ever has to do is to leave her bedside alone and empty.

_41: still_

Her hand is motionless until it starts curling reflexively around his as she stirs; there's no rush of nurses to assess her condition, not yet, but she looks up at him and smiles, and his heart moves a little inside his chest.

_42: citric acid_

"I'm _fine_," she insists through sips of orange juice, "I've just been staying up too late, which is completely your fault, you know— Thomas, why are you looking at me like that…?"

_43: die_

"He kills me in every vision," she confesses in the smallest voice she's ever used in her life, and Thomas pulls her close against his every instinct telling him not to hold her, not to succumb to the need, and says, "You're not going to die, and I'll save you from it again if I have to."

_44: two roads_

Very belatedly, Rio starts to consider that perhaps their paths have converged onto each other irreversibly now, and maybe it's time they started acknowledging it.

_45: through the fire_

Watching the hearth in the Arclight house, she's mesmerized rather than terrified by the flames, and feels not an icy chill but a warm frisson skate up her back when he sneaks an arm around her shoulders; fire finally becomes a comforting metaphor rather than a destructive force, after that.

_46: drop_

Rio has just finished making her super definitive decision about what she plans to do about her situation when Thomas ducks into the corner bakery and out of the rain, drops of water running down his face and hair and making her doubt herself all over again when the sympathetic vibe starts to flare up inside her left chest.

_47: dirt_

She wouldn't love a dirty man like me anyway, he reminds himself; his hands are too stained with blood, burns, and thoughts of her to ever let herself be held in them.

_48: young_

"I don't care about the age difference between us if you don't," Rio starts to say, but her voice dies in her throat, leaving it again as a friendly statement rather than allowing it to evolve into a greater gesture — how much more tension is it going to take before she can stop hesitating?

_49: preservatives_

"I don't want to risk losing what we have, because I have never had someone mean more to me than you do now… but god damn it, if you're still hesitating, _I'll_ fucking do it — Rio, can I kiss you?"

_50: breaking the rules_

She's just gotten done pulling at the lapel of his shirt and kissing him, hard, and before he can move in on her first, when she whispers into his lips, "Forget the press, forget the tension; you wanted to help me make up my mind and seize chances when they arise, and I wanted you to forgive yourself enough to feel worthy — I think we've both accomplished those goals well enough, so we should finally afford this to ourselves, don't you think?"


End file.
